Ultimately, I just feel deflated after finishing (or well, getting an ending at any rate) Fading Afternoon, and not in a way that feels intended, more in a "this game has defeated me" sort of way. I really liked The Friends Of Ringo Ishikawa when I played it, it had a rough warming up period and I still would have liked it if it was a tiny bit less obtuse about what you can do but seemingly Yeo would burst into flames if anything in his games was known to you from the outset. That being said I ended up falling in love with its existential life sim mixed with a River City Ransom esque beat em up.

I think the main issue for me is that Ringo was a life sim with beat em up elements, whereas Fading Afternoon is a beat em up with life sim elements. After restarting once or twice because I had completely cocked up my playthrough by not knowing stuff (like that getting a car asap, always paying your hotel stay forward, reinforcing your territories and starting the gang war asap so you can start making money) I started to get into the groove of things. The groove of combat, combat and more combat. After what steam tells me were 5.5 hours I genuinely think I did like 2 side activities tops. All I could focus on, given the nature of the timeslots and gang war mechanics was on beating people up and finding the next Shatei to cap.

I guess I'll drop a spoiler warning here although given my playthrough there isnt all that much to spoil. The premise is, newly released Seiji Maruyama is slowly dying of cancer, he has limited time to figure out what to do before he checks out. My interpretation was that he wanted to leave the cowed Azuma a stronger clan with territory and the game seemingly leads you in this direction so I started a gang war with Tanaka whilst doing whatever other secondary bullshit Azuma told me to do. Soon I met Kato, a young hothead that Seiji takes under his wing. Now, I do like how the slowly depleting max health and limited timeslots reinforce the narrative and even the frustratingly obtuse flow of time kind of aids in this also, but again, for me it just led to me doing nothing but fighting and more fighting.

More to the point, I just don't like Seiji as a character. Maybe its cause a shithead teenager like Ringo is much more relatable to me than an old dying murderer but he just bores me, honestly. The mix which worked for me about ringo was that combination of the combat yes, but importantly the characters, the dialogue and atmosphere. There definitely is an atmosphere in FA, but that atmosphere is 90% fuckers throwing bottles at your head : which you can avoid by either a) timing a backstep b) already being in guard mode or c) being in a different z axis but most streets are narrow so this is unreliable.

I'm pretty bad at this combat, I think its only now after 5 hours I somewhat have a handle on things. Its like they made the counter be absolutely busted and able to destroy 90% of the ground goons so then they had to throw in Mr Bottle thrower, commander katana prick and admiral gunman "I hope you can pull off the gun stealing technique here or you are fucked" to pose a challenge. I only now sort of know how to somewhat consistently defeat the bottle throwers.

Again, comparing the critical path to Ringo, this is way more obtuse than ringo ever was. I know Yeo handwaves most criticism of this aspect by saying something like "I make my games so you have to pay attention and read the dialogue carefully" and fair enough, but also sometimes I straight up wrote all the dialogue down for future reference and still it was unclear what I was supposed to do. Which, maybe Im stupid but after asking on the steam forums I have to share an absolute bullshit bit of the storyline : Azuma asked us to incriminate someone by seducing a hostess, I went there with Kato (one of the few characters I gave a shit about) and we had a conversation about killing and blah blah anyways at the end Kato says "when are the girls coming" and then Im outside the hostess club. Huh?! What the fuck? What just happened? Okay, apparently I was supposed to realize that the dude we were supposed to incriminate (who Im pretty sure we were never shown a photo of so how was I meant to intuit that exactly?) was there with a blonde woman, therefore that was the woman that Azuma mentioned was sleeping with the guy, therefore I was supposed to come back another day and try to seduce the blonde lady (after two tries cause the first she just wasnt available). AVGN VOICE "HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT"

So anyways, after a dull, repetitive, demoralising routine of punching people, shooting shateis Azuma got a meeting with the Oyabun and was made to give them back some territory and call a truce. At which point I just didnt know what to do. I had spent so much time on it that I just let out a big long sigh. I thought about restarting the war but that would probably make azuma mad so I didnt. I started another one with Harada. I will say, for all my complaining I still played 6 hours of this game, which is way more than I give to most games that bring this level of anger and demoralisation to me, so on some level I was semi enjoying it. Big old spoilers now, eventually Azuma tells me to kill some TV presenter and have Kato take the heat for it. I go to the promenade but hes not there. I go to some territory that was under fire and I get sent to the hospital, where Seiji finally succumbs to his illness.

I remember a lot of people complaining that Ringo had only one ending, that none of your choices really changed the final outcome but I thought that was the point! And what an ending it was, love it or hate it, its memorable. I guess its my fault for fucking up but what a way to let the air out of me. Regarding the combat I also remember reading that Yeo once ran a poll a few years/months ago which asked what people most liked about his game, which people voted mostly for the atmosphere and gameplay almost least. He then had kind of a meltdown over it. So whilst I havent played Stone Buddha I think this is his response, lets laser focus on making the combat the key element and everything else is secondary. The billiard minigame still sucks btw. I'm sure this is probably a selling point to the beat em up heads out there, and maybe I'm just not the audience Yeo wants anymore, personally Ive played three beat em ups ever and those include FA and Ringo, so idk.

I have heard that this game has some kind of looping component, and that you can give the bag with a bunch of money to the food stand guy to get in the next playthrough, but I am so done with this game. Everything about it seems focused on making first time players suffer in favour of people who will grind 8 runs on the game but I just cannot imagine doing another run, I feel miserable now. Feel free to comment "filtered!" if you read this far though

Didn't originally write a review for this because I didn't finish it, but I feel like I need to get some closure here. Sagres was one of my biggest disappointments this year. This might be an odd thing to say of a game who's existence I learned of the very same day it released but the demo I played of it had so much promise and charm I can't believe they fucked it up.

Sagres is an exploration themed RPG set in the age of sail. Under the auspices of Prince Henry the navigator of Portugal, you play as an aspiring sailor who joins the navy in part to help a friend get to the bottom of the intrigue of her missing Father. The game's name derives from the popular (if wrong) idea of Prince Henry setting up a sort of center of learning at the town of Sagres to train cartographers and navigators of all sorts. But don't worry, thats like the least of Sagres' liberties when it comes to historical accuracy.

The core of Sagres is simple, you obtain information and quests from guilds to "discover" landmarks around the world, ranging from "check out this church in Spain, we've heard it looks cool" to "Figure out if we can reach India via Africa because the land route is not really feasible right now". You have to manage your ship's durability and resources, though its not super in depth and you can do the usual thing of trading resources by buying goods from one port and selling it at another where its a higher price. This is the good bit of this game.

There's also turnbased, literal rocks, paper, scissors combat with pirates and other enemy sailors. You line up 3 cards to play against the opponents 3 cards and the level of "insight" your character has determines how many cards you can see face up from either the 3 cards on the table or the cards the AI isnt playing this round. Its fine, mostly RNG fest, I lost like twice during the whole game even though I was "underleveled". Also, this game doesn't understand what a privateer is? A privateer isnt just the name for a european pirate, its a pirate in service to a country.

I think I was sold on the demo and the game when I reached Copenhaguen and none of my party members spoke the local language very profficiently so the dialogue with the local pub owner who would give me information on where to see the northern lights for the quest I was in went some thing like "H`, yo/)ll ne^+ to hçad <p t@ t`ç 66&X 20*>". I could either guess what he was trying to say or search around for a Translator in a nearby port. This would cost money and time, importantly, which I might not have. Its moments like these or even when I was going around africa blindly not knowing where the next port was with dwindling supplies, a damaged ship and low crew morale and I managed to just about reach the safety of port, Sagres excels.

And man, we do not have enough historical themed non action RPGs that don't suck. There's like, Pentiment, Darklands(though I havent played it yet) and what? Maybe there's some Japanese one's I dont know about.

So, given all this goodwill, how does Sagres fuck it all up? Well, for one thing, that language system I mentioned is kinda rough. Now, I get that in a game such as this there are going to have to be compromises and simplifications and I'll even grant that it makes sense to treat certain languages more as language families or perhaps take the view of the portuguese navigators rather than a more objective modern view. But at some point it just doesn't make sense that Spanish and Portuguese get their own languages but "Romance", "Germanic" and most egregious of all "African" get lumped in as if they were monolithic.

Similarly, whilst the game at least has the good sense to condemn imperialism of the Americas, its hard not to see the entire game as a romanticisation of european colonialism through the lens of "exploration". Although unintentionally it does kinda subvert it by having 90% of these "discoveries" be places that were well known beforehand like the cathedral at Santiago etc. There is also the whole chapter of the game taking place in the americas which, idk man I'm not the most qualified to talk about and it has been a week or two since I played it but its about what you would expect in terms of pretty milquetoast commentary on colonialism and the like (though there's one point at which the indigenous leader talks about how much he likes this new rum that the europeans have been making which uhh)

There is also a chapter in which you go to Egypt and in order to enter Alexandria (which is closed off to europeans apparently) you have to... wear a turban. Thats seemingly all it takes for europeans to blend in with Egyptians. I think this is where the first red flag appeared to me.

There's also a semi fantastical element, which I'm fine with because its kind of hidden, its like they took all the stories of sailors encountering fantastical creatures and just made it real.

Anyways, at the end of my playthrough I got to the point in which you reach the Americas and it becomes extremely tedious. Beyond the aforementioned stuff with the depiction of the preHispanic central America, the game takes away all your ship parts and makes you go around for way, way too long to obtain them all, grinding as you are essentially in a sort of slave/serf relationship to an indigenous chief. After all that and grinding trade between havana and some town on the yucatan I had all my ship parts paid off and returned, whereupon I was informed I needed to grind 200,000 of the local currency in order to proceed. I had 3500. So I abandoned the game, it wasn't hard to make money admittedly, just slow and tedious, but the game had already lost me and frankly I have better things to do.

I give this game an extra half a star for including Las Palmas as a port and ignoring Tenerife completely. I audibly cheered when I saw this. That being said, the inhabitants shared the default sprite for "Africa" which, I guess given the previous simplifications in language and culture isnt super egregious but it just underscores the lack of understanding or care.

"Style has a substance all of its own" - Joseph Stalin

I remember a few weeks ago speaking to a friend who was bemoaning the impossibility of replaying detective mystery games because, already knowing their mysteries the experience falls flat as there is nothing to solve.
"Lol, Skill Issue" I responded and here I am on a second playthrough of Paradise Killer

Its kind of insane how much Paradise Killer works, because in theory all of its ideas sound like they should fall utterly flat on their faces. An Open World investigative detective game? Taking a genre that's traditionally strictly linear so as to control the pacing of the story and parcel out small bits of information as it builds towards a meticulously planned reveal of the truth behind it all ; and just letting the player piece it (relatively) unguided? A whole ass 3D open world made by, going by the credits, essentially 2 people? Platforming mechanics in first person added on top of what is essentially an adventure game visual novel? To steal a joke from a certain someone - "That's not a recipe for disaster, that's the fucking Anarchist's Cookbook!"

Paradise Killer sort of does the impossible by turning these seemingly contradictory design decisions to work in its favour. Its to its credits that even on a second playthrough I was utterly enthralled, going from brutalist skyscrapers built to rule over masses of kidnapped innocents to drop down and airdash into one of their living quarters finding things like a set of dominoes or a love letter, evidence of their humanity that the syndicate tried so hard to deny them. There was always something out there to spot through the corner of my eye, a blood vial, a conversation with the ever entertaining Shinji or a new music track to earworm its way into my brain. Incidentally both the idea of having music unlock with finding it in the open world and the in-universe customizable music playlist are kind of amazing and I hope someone else does something similar at some point.

Another possible weakness would of course be that a 3D world made by two people on a low budget is going to be hard to get fancy with shaders and complex geometry etc but Paradise Killer embraces these limitations. The sort of brutalist architecture of the syndicate as these big Imposing rectangular buildings of concrete tower over the player contrast against the more obviously japanese inspired residential areas, the looming, harsh structures of the power of the Syndicate almost looking down at the housing of the citizenry they opress. The garish at times mix of purples and gold of the Opulent Ziggurat, a sort of marriage of city pop album cover and horrifying lovecraftian death cult adds to me a sense of a sort of banality of evil. These people just dont really reflect on the morality of their insane plan all that much as they do their intrigues, their high fashion and luxury lifestyles. A couple of days ago I read a piece on this game comparing Paradise Killer to Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, a famous story about a society built on the suffering of a single child and in that sense PK becomes a whole lot closer to home, for all its musings on Eldritch Gods and transdimensional demons and pocket dimension islands.

Because ultimately whilst I don't sacrifice people to appease a race of genocidal space aliens my existence and prosperity is partly also built on the suffering of others, namely animals and the exploited, imperialized world.

Paradise Killer even did the impossible for me, it made me care about its lore and worldbuilding told mainly through the medium of item descriptions. Dark Souls couldn't make me care but PK did with about a fraction of the budget. Its just very good at drawing you in, and I think a detective game is more condusive to making me interested in the approach when all you are doing at the end of the day IS learning about the world, the architecture, the character designs everything else is feeding into your brain as you explore every nook and cranny hunting for clues in this world. As much as the open world can fool you into believing you're in total control, there is a deliberate parceling out of information based on the order you find things but it never becomes a railroad of forced linearity, there are always threads to pull even if those threads themselves are interlinked and may require steps in a certain order.

There is a lot of Paradise Killer that will turn people off, as I said before its kind of a miracle it works (for me) and there is definitely stuff to criticise. The collectible currency is easy to find and use but other than the footbath upgrades (and incidentally I sincerely hope people realized that the investment in blood crystals was worth it because the game doesnt really signal that these unlock movement powers until youve already spent the sum) starlight upgrades and various minor things you get way more than you'll ever need. I was achievement hunting for this game on a second playthrough and I was suprised at how little I had to go out of my way to get for the achievements. At first it looks like the collectibles are haphazardly spread around but I can definitely say now that there is a method to the madness. There is a cost to unlock the fast travel spots (sure) but also to use them (boo), though again this is the BOTW thing where there are way more blood crystals than you could ever need and I ended up with a surplus of 30, so really I think the fast travel cost is just to make a use for it, which seems a bit like breaking a bone so you can use your new set of crutches but its not that big of a deal, the island is small and most out of the way places you probably wont need to go more than once or twice.

If there was one word to describe Paradise Killer it might be indulgent, and there is definitely a case to be made that the game could have been improved if at certain design meetings someone had told the creators NO but I think indulging is good once in a while. Even if it alienates a substantial portion of the audience I like the boldness of the vaporwave aesthetic, even if Im not the biggest fan of the genre if ther was ever one album to convert me it might be the OST to this game which is a certified banger.

I'm certainly not the person who could or even should make this point well, especially cause I might make it wrong and step over what others who are more directly affected by this but given the diversity in character designs which is both a credit to the overall aesthetic of the game and to better inclusivity in the industry, its kind of unfortunate given the obvious japanese inspiration of the setting (the city pop, the combinis, the japanese whisky, dead nebula's zaibatsu, etc etc) that there are no on-screen Japanese Characters. Similarly, again its not a point I feel confident in making but I think there is something to be said about the wave of fascination with certain superficial aspects of japanese popculture that this game belongs to that could be said to come from a place of the "othering" of Japan as a sort of mythical special place for westerners to endlessly gawk at in the naïve belief that its a place to escape to, either physically or mentally from the banality of the places we live in.

Not maliciously of course and Im not suggesting any conscious prejudice or anything of the sort on the part of the developers, but I think its a phenomenon worth examining and reflecting on. In the art book for the game there is an account from one of the designers which I'll paraphrase here but essentially it was something like During the pandemic it was depressing to live in boring, grey, dull England, I wanted to go to somewhere cool, Like Japan! I love Japan! This is on the one hand understandable, lord knows I have thrown myself in escapism when I have been unsatisfied with my current life situation but I think its a remnant of a particular european/western attitude towards Japan. I think its great to show appreciation for other cultures and learn more about them, even celebrate aspects or (respectfully and appropriately) incoporate them into your own, but its important to remember that Japan or any other country, is a country, its not Disney Land.

All that aside, Paradise Killer remains a tremendously absorbing mystery game which I have played through a second time I think I have enjoyed even more than the first. Even the relatively rushed and not super involving trial sequence didnt really feel all that out of place : Paradise Killer is a game about investigation more than Justice, both mechanically and thematically. I enjoy how it all fits into the story as Lady Love Dies is essentially a lib, critical of the excesses of the syndicate and their worse crimes and corruption but never for a second doubting their overall goal. She's evil but doesn't think she's evil, which is refreshing to me. See you in Perfect 25.

Do you ever stare out the window of a moving vehicle when something odd catches your eye? Like a strange looking building or statue or even a person who suddenly appears within the frame of your window and just as quickly, disappears never to be seen again?

Sometimes you might be tempted to find out what it was, look up "giant pizza statue in [local city]" or whatever, hell, gmaps even shows these in larger cities nowadays. But personally I think the not knowing is more enjoyable most of the time. Same is true of taking pictures of scenery from a train or a bus, there is no guarantee of a good shot.

4ever Transit Authority is a game about staring out the window of a bus on a procedurally generated city. Im not a big roguelike fan usually, but I think the use of proc gen in this project is appropriate. It achieves that thing of creating a plausibly mundane environment with less common eccentricities sprinkled throughout, thus making these stand out in contrast. Of course this runs the risk of ruining the mystique if you played it long enough to start seeing the method to the madness, but this is a free "concept game" more than anything and playing it for hours and hours seems kind of absurd. Paradoxically for a game called Forever, its shelf life is quite brief, though I think its poignant in a way which might be unintentional, like the brevity of any one of its sights.

The city is quite american in its structure, very square-like and road centric but there is some charm to it. There are no passengers with you but I suppose there don't really need to be any. The colour scheme changing with each line is a neat touch and helps relieve some of the monotony inherent to the game although some colour schemes are a lot more visually appealing than others. The visuals in general I enjoy, I think the style is called art deco? Reminds me of certain famous propaganda posters for building projects, but Im no art expert.

I think I found it quite captivating because I don't have much of a commute anymore, and when I do Im usually on my bicycle or car, which kind of precludes staring out the window for minutes on end without being killed. Maybe because of my ADHD I used to stare pretty intently on the bus/carpool to school or when going on a daytrip to the beach; alternating between intense daydreaming and looking at scenery. Even the fact that your view is blocked by the frame of the bus ingame only makes it more compelling to me, the limitation enhancing the simple pleasure and "challenge" of getting a good look at something which piques your interest.

I am slowly making my way semi backwards through Turnfollow's output, and I think so far the 1 throughline of their work is a strong grasp on mundaneity and everyday life. Hopefully the rest of their output continues this trend.

Edit : Funny how much of a difference music makes to a game, I wrote this review after playing this game muted during a boring class, and now having played with sound, other than the various cute SFX, the actual music seems to go for a sort of foreboding thing? I think I liked it better without the music lol.

"Don't you know that Blackmail is way uncool?" - Ryo Hazuki

I played Shenmue through the Shenmue 1 and 2 compilation on Steam, I think its pretty much the same version as the original minus disc swapping but if there are any major differences I wouldnt know. I was mainly interested in Playing Shenmue after really enjoying The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa a couple of months ago, which is a game that takes some inspiration from Shenmue in some aspects. And, since I think Shenmue has already been talked about from a myriad different angles on this site I think a nice compare and contrast will be good to do, especially to explain my personal experience with Shenmue and Ringo.

I was genuinely surprised when I started Shenmue and found myself enjoying the game, which underscores the benefits of playing things you might not think you'll like on the off chance you will. Its reputation for being slow and obtuse had my "filter-dar" screaming at me. Fortunately this reputation turned out to be mostly undeserved, especially the first 2/3rds of the game. It was honestly smooth sailing for most of the game, following a routine of exploring the various areas of the town interacting with locals and practicing combos at the local park. Shenmue is basically a point and click adventure game, you talk to people, follow leads, write down what you know in your notepad etc. At first the rather odd control scheme (not just the tank controls in a non horror game but the RT + joystick to shift Ryo's gaze until the camera locks on into something interactable was certainly not what Im used to) threw me off but its not too hard to get used to it.

At first there is a nice balance of progressing the main story and also doing side activities like the arcade, a couple of sidequests that flesh out the lives of the inhabitants of the town. The pacing is slow but its nice how much of it is dictated by the player, letting you take it all in, hell even the decision to not have fast travel (well, kinda) at first seemingly encourages going back and forth and running into scripted events. The problem however, and here's where the comparison to Ringo becomes more relevant, is that as you progress the pacing becomes a lot worse, the activities you have to do to kill time are really not all that compelling after a while, you get told to come back tomorrow or in a few hours and time just moves way too slowly. See, in Ringo the activities arent great either but times moves a lot quicker and the decisions you make are so much more rooted in roleplaying and just being able to squeeze as much as you can onto a day that until the very end of the game you are basically never bored. In Shenmue however by the time Dobuita started putting up christmas decorations I was just spending most of my time pressing forward + x to strengthen my pit blow combo.

Its funny, Ringo is a game about an aimless youth with no future where you're constantly trying to do it all but Shenmue is a game about a singleminded youth driven by revenge constantly fucking around doing nothing of note. If the mechanic is the message, Shenmue's time system could honestly work well for a reverse of Outer Wilds message. I find Ryo Hazuki to be not particularly compelling, mainly cause he's constantly alienating everyone who's ever loved him and who's telling him that his quest for revenge is stupid and dangerous, which they are right to do so. Now, I know that that is the point, its the whole martial arts drama schtick where a tragic quest for revenge means the MC must give it all up to pursue it, and Im sure if we ever get Shenmue 30 or whatever there will be some ironic twist to make Ryo doubt his own resolve and all that stuff. But I just dont find him or that arc compelling. Ringo is also a tragic figure who pushes away his friends and is seemingly doomed to waste his life away or even have it cut short, but he's much more human and relatable to me. Ringo is a game to me, about having too little time, but Shenmue is a game about having too much.

Its hard to sympathise much with Ryo when his Dad had no appearance beyond his inmediate murder when the game starts and incidentally, whilst the lack of certain modern conveniences enhance this game, if it were made today there would definitely be a playable prologue before the events of the game with Ryo doing some errands or something for his dad, tutorialising the various mechanics and such. A lot of this might also be the legendarily wooden acting of the english dub which I admit I picked due to its infamy but honestly there is just too little of Ryo himself being anything other than stoic angry man for me to really care. This isnt even a matter of Ryo being pretty distinct from the player because again in Ringo you are even more disconnected, not even privy to most of the conversations Ringo has with his gang members.

The kind of character and structure of the game with its slow humanism, feeding cats, helping the bullied etc makes the main quest jarring to me, Ringo should be collecting signatures to save the local school or something, not plotting murder. Perhaps this is just a personal thing, but then again if you were expecting anything else from this review then you were mistaken.

The game definitely takes a dip when the harbour is introduced, which is even more barren and boring than the main town, though thankfully most of your time is spent with forklift races and box moving, which are unironic highlights of the game. By this point though, Shenmue was really starting to wear thin, even the fights started to become more of an annoyance than a nice change of pace. There are a couple of scenes where Ringo shows some interesting side to him with Mark and Gui Zhang and Tom, but after a slightly annoying battle (I am also fairly shit at fighting games, so whilst I did well for 90% of the game I struggled with the final bout) the game just sort of ends. Its kind of ballsy just how much of a sequel hook the game ends on, seemingly treating Shenmue 1 as the first season of a drama series, fitting, I suppose but from what I have gathered the story of the series is far from over 20+ years later.

So why did I love Ringo but not so much Shenmue? Other than the points mentioned above, Ringo's character moments are so much more memorable to me, I will remember some lines in Shenmue for their delivery and silliness, but moments like Ringo not sharing his literature essay in class or his exchange with his teacher about wasted talent stick to me a lot more. I still enjoyed Shenmue and I'm glad I played it, but whatever it is that the people who love this game (and a lot of them being people who's writing I admire and respect on this very site) saw in it I just didnt quite find. Perhaps the nature of the "right place, right time" events meant I missed a bunch of things, and apparently Ryo's love interest Nozomi has most of her lines relegated to phone conversations? Of which I saw none and was wondering why she's such a flat line for most of the game despite her importance to Ryo and parts of the plot.

I'm not rushing to Play Shenmue 2 any time soon but who knows, maybe Ill play it at some point and come back to revise my thoughts on the first entry.

Ive slowed down a bit on the amount of reviews I write because I feel like for most games I play I simply dont "have anything to say" about them. I think thats still the case for this game but I just kind of need to get it out of my system : fuck this game.

What an amazing first impression, the music, the artstyle and even the writing with its subtlety and charm. Unfortunately as you get through it all you'll start to realize how boring most of the game is, mainly through repetition. Its kind of impressive how much a mere 3 hour (at least thats what my 2 runs ended up clocking at) game can outstay its welcome in this manner. The very backgrounds that were once gorgeous to look at become a reminder of the annoyance of having to see it again. You basically go through every single location twice, in a game which demands multiple runs of you!

I get the feeling that at some point someone is going to beat this game and tell me that "oh, that was the point" somehow, as usually happens on the internet whenever I dislike a particular design decision, but honestly I dont see it. I fail to see how the repetition adds to anything, it isnt moody or atmospheric, it doesnt reinforce any point about the themes of the game (unless being bored out of my mind has anything to do with entropy, stories or colonialism) and even if it did would not be worth doing anyways.

The puzzles are lame but honestly I didnt even mind that all that much. More than anything I think Ive started to despise the "syke, you got the bad ending! try again to get the good one" structure that historically a lot of videogames have adopted, doubly so in a game which is again, repetitive and boring. I am admittedly unhinged and I did think for a joke about copy pasting each paragraph of this review 3 or 4 times to make reading it a chore in a parallel to the game but even I'M not pretentious enough for that.

At the end of the day, I ran through the game once, got a bad ending, got told to find something, did another run, this time doing different things and seemingly being pushed in a different direction, but again a different bad ending. Now, am I going to run through again to get the good ending? No, get fucked, the game already lost me after the first run, a third run would count as self flagellation. Its my own damn fault for playing an adventure game on launch, always play this shit a few months down the line when you can look up the true ending path and not have more of your limited time on this planet wasted.

Edit : half a star for the "flora de las islas canarias" tome in the background of one of the locations

Edit 2: Okay, someone posted a walkthrough of the game and now I can say for sure I didnt miss much by bailing on this game. As it turns out the "runs" are entirely artificial, they all go the same, you do 1st run, then 2nd then you get the true ending on the 3rd. The ending sort of contextualizes why and its not the worst thing Ive seen, but the writing in general smacks of (to quote fellow Backloggd user Gare) "this is my project in submitting because I want an internship at Pixar but I never learned how to tell a story" though I guess that should be toei and not pixar cause its a japanese game. The runs are KINDA justified in conveying the themes of the story but that still doesnt make the game any less dull or repetitive so whatever, I stand by my original review

My Child: Lebensborn concerns the fate of the children born to the Lebensborn program in Norway after the Second World War. I was not aware of such a program before I came across this game but it did a good job of explaining it specifically in the case of Norway as well as attempting to explain why these children faced the abuse they did without veering into apologia.

I am going to provide a few links below but without going into too much detail, the Lebensborn program was an initiative by head of the SS Heinrich Himmler to promote the birth of "biologically valuable" children as per the Nazis own racial eugenics policies. It took place all over the occupied territories but Norway especially given its place in Nazi racial ideology. The Nazis would set up centers for women giving birth to children from soldiers/ss officers away from the judging eyes of their families and neighbours.

After the war, many of the women involved in the program and even just suspected of having slept with german soldiers were punished severely with public humiliation and even arrest/internment. As the game points out, at times these women were treated more harshly than people who had actively collaborated with the occupiers, mostly due to a misogynistic "their bodies belong only to norweigans" attitudes.

The children born of the program faced mental and physical abuse by the general population following the war, hatred for the nazis and their ideology being channeled into mistreating children who had nothing to do with it beyond the circumstances of their birth. Many were even interned in mental asylums for years following prevailing psychiatric consensus that they must be mentally stunted.

My Child Lebensborn follows a single parent adopting one of these children, a boy or a girl depending on your choice. It follows essentially the same core mechanics as Pou or other pet simulators, which seems insane to say about raising a human child but thats genuinely what the mechanics most resemble, taking care of hunger, cleanliness and boredom of the child whilst having to go to work monday through saturday with limited time to do everything from sewing clothes, cooking, bathing the child etc.

You follow this routine as little (klaus in my case) starts to go to school at seven years old and starts to wonder about their biological parents as well as facing bullying from the schoolchildren and even the teachers at the school. There is a walking dead style system of dialogue choices pushing Klaus into either hardening his heart to endure the stigma he will have to deal with and trusting no one or trying to keep whatever innocence is being taken from him by the cruel conditions hes facing. Its genuinely heart breaking stuff, it makes me wonder what I would do if I ever had childen myself and dealt with such a horrible thing happening to them without inmediately flying into a white hot rage and doing something impulsive.

There is also the subject of either investigating and sharing Klaus' parentage with him, including also whether or not to try to explain what the nazis were and why their actions are responsible for the bullying he endures whilst also making clear that none of this is Klaus' fault, which is hard for a kid to understand and for an adult to explain.

I don't really have much of a conclusion here, this game was honestly upsetting, but in a way that is obviously intentional. I think I would just encourage anyone who's read this far to read up on the stories of these children which are documented below. I would also encourage people to visit the Children of War website, I believe part of the profits made from the game go to the NGO.

https://mychildlebensborn.com/about-us/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lebensborn-program
https://www.thechildrenofwar.org/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-chosen-ones-the-war-children-born-to-nazi-fathers-in-a-sinister-eugenics-scheme-speak-out-771017.html

Disaster Report 5 is a very memorable ride that makes up for its flaws in sheer entertainment value. Its the kind of game that makes me rethink if I should even be giving games numerical scores out of 10. Its kind of a mess? But a very fun mess, the kind that can only come about when a game attempts to be simultaneously silly, somber, challenging, funny, absurd, human and dramatic at the same time.

I am not familiar with the rest of the disaster report franchise but judging by the other reviews on the page it would seem this was a fairly big departure from the series which was up until then focused more on the schlock, action sequences and cartoonish supervillains than the relatively more toned down, more serious natural disaster and human drama of 4... er, I mean 5!

From what little I know, it seems that the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake kind of forced the change in the series (also the transition to HD that caused so much trouble for the japanese industry around 7th gen), a deeply traumatic event in the japanese collective psyche, I presume not addressing it or treating it lightly might have been very poorly received. Instead we have a very episodic series of vignettes and character moments threaded by adventure game inventory puzzles, light survival sims and moral choices; all of which tie back into the broader theme of natural disasters and their impact on people. Indeed one of MANY 4th wall breaks includes a random citizen in "not Shibuya" pointing to a poster for Disaster Report 4 and wondering something along the lines of "I wonder if this will affect the games' release", acknowledging the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake's effect on both the dev cycle of the game and the impact on its writing.

The game doesnt completely give up on its roots and this is kind of where my earlier point of the game being "kind of a mess" comes from. Its a hard thing to complain about, tonal shifts; cause even beyond the usual subjectivity of any criticism, it feels like they are more susceptible to a third person going "it didnt feel jarring/it worked for me" and the discussion cant really go anywhere from there. Personally its just hard to take the more melancholy gritty drama when so much of the game is really silly. I just get whiplash and honestly the number one emotion I have experienced playing this game is laughter and joy ; which I like, but it feels like the underlying message is being lost a bit.

Spoilers for the game generally from here on out

I absolutely love the dialogue options, even though I am a coward who never picked the evil options, just their presence alone has made me laugh more than almost any other game this year. Lines such as "before I inform you, will you give me money" or the contextually funny "I pray only for those who worship me" after becoming the leader of a cult or "I felt lonely upon realizing I cant meet her again in the sequel" after the tragic death of a character (though this one incidentally completely saps away any sadness I could have felt for this moment). Its also the fact that a big chunk of the game is collecting and wearing stupid outfits, which is cool but also deflates the seriousness whenever the game tries its hand at it, personally.

On the subject of morality, I genuinely don't know if the moral/inmoral points are supposed to be taken seriously or not or who is even deciding what they are. I won't be the first or last person to complain about quantifying morality as a variable in a game, but even accepting it, why do I get 100 good guy points for taking over as cult leader but 200 bad guy points for blowing up a ship full of human traffickers who are currently kidnapping me and others? At points the morality system makes sense in that good guy points are won by being selfless and helping out in a crisis situation whereas being a selfish, "every man for himself" type prick nets you bad guy points. The rest of the time however they feel arbitrary and in all honesty the story is going to railroad you into doing good and bad things regarless of your character if you were roleplaying as mother teresa or patrick bateman.

Much has been talked about the infamous "miracle water" episode wherein we trick a bunch of stand ins for the tendency in humans generally and presumably some japanese people specifically to devolve into in-group out-group xenophobia and prejudice in an emergency situation, into buying our magic water which is just regular plain water. Its pretty upsetting how that subplot ends and though I havent played the epilogue yet, I think Danny, the foreign exchange student who gets caught up in our scheme through no fault of his own gets beaten up by the mob dies? Im not too sure, it was kind of unclear. A nitpicky complaint I have also: why cant I use my money here? Were victimized by the xenophobic pricks at the school and have to beg them to share their food but I had 30 million yen? Surely even the biggest UKIP voter would have given us an onigiri for a 100k? I think the cult subplot bears mention, even if its kind of rushed and bizarre. Essentially you join an obvious cult preying on people's desesperation and vulnerability and get promoted to leader in about 15 minutes, before just as quickly being run off as a traitor (though not before making off with their money).

The actual gameplay for the most part is just basically fine, mostly "find the NPC to talk to" and trying not to get crushed or otherwise killed by debris from the quake aftershocks for the first few hours. I like the narrative and gameplay progression of there being fewer physical dangers as the days go by, you return to old areas which are now being repaired, generators being set up to light up darker areas etc. There's a real sense of time passing and the situation slowly returning to normal, in a sense. I like some of the cooler details like early on there is no power or running water anywhere but the CEO of a company has seemingly the only generator in the building powering a fan to keep them cool in their office. There is a bit of that whole point and click adventure bullshit with "You havent talked to person A yet, so person B hasn't materialized from the Ether yet" flag based causality which can get annoying. Similarly there is a tendency for game continuing cutscenes to not trigger unless you approach them in a specific direction or whatever which can get annoying, especially at first.

The character's generally are quite memorable even if they (not including the epilogue I havent played through yet) don't all have a resolution or their arc just sort of stops at some point. I like Danny, the phoney store manager is hilarious, Kanae etc. There is also one very jarring and sudden inclusion of violent SA which is admittedly not shown to the audience but is so jarring and seemingly quickly brushed aside as to cause actual whiplash. I think the issue of violence against women is definitely one worth exploring in media, especially by a piece which is trying to create some kind of broad representation of society and their various reactions to trauma and disasters, but this game is really not equipped to do so in this case and just feels very ill-advised and even exploitative, imo.

It ties into the broader trend of the game struggling to keep both its identity as a wacky unserious disaster schlock sim and an obligation to treat its subject matter more seriously.

That aside, I hope I havent created the impression that I dislike this game, because for all I can complain about its still a game I enjoyed more than most this year and has kept me hooked for its entire runtime, though it is admittedly an 8 hour game. Fitting for a game with the subtitle 'Summer Memories' I played it during the bits of free time I have had during a recent summer trip to a hot spring town, and I will remember both the trip and the game vividly for a long time.

I wasn't originally going to write a review for this game but its occupied my mind for a week or so after playing and I take that as a sign from the BL gods.

A Hand with Many Fingers is a really interesting game which struggles to stick the landing through an admittedly somewhat deliberate anticlimax.

I love detective games, I have played dozens of them from the point and click jenny leclues to the subversive pentiment to the more VN-like Paranormasights. There is something almost primal in the urge to solve a mystery, a challenge from the creator to the player to unravel their cleverly constructed puzzle.

IRL I once found some photographs inside a hollow tree (really) which I somehow managed to track down to the owner and get the "backstory" of them and how they had ended up there.
The photos were not much of a clue, other than one which seemed to show the old woman on tower bridge in London with old looking buses. 80s maybe? Probably a holiday picture. For a day or two I speculated on the pictures and their origins, followed a few leads from a business card found at the "scene of the crime" with a long ass name and a telephone number written behind one of the pictures. The number was a dead end, the line was no longer in use. Perhaps they moved out? I searched for the long name on google and found it within a few government websites from records of a few lawsuits/petitions to the local government, most of them dead ends.

But then, I found the name under a website made by a mexican PhD student who had done a whole genealogical study of a particular historical town in mainland spain, which showed the name of the woman on the business card and her children. More leads! I searched those and found that one of them was a lawyer who had actually represented Leonel Messi and Jordi Pujol? He lived in Barcelona however, and was probably busy. Another was a veterinarian somewhere far from me. 2 others however, were a lawyer and architect respectively and lived in my home town. The lawyer had an office and phone number, but this during a holiday so no response. I decided to go to where I found the pictures and luckily I found one more of the same woman at the beach which looked like one the local beaches and more importantly another phone number which I politely whatsapped explaining the situation (a bit awkwardly admittedly).

Now, eventually we met up and I gave her the pictures and got most of the answers to these mysteries, some of my "deductions" were right and some were completely wrong but it was still incredibly gratifying and thankfully she wasnt like, creeped out or anything which I slightly feared especially cause I knew her by name from the website, she turned out to be a friend of a neighbour of mine, small world.

Okay, but why did I spend three paragraphs explaining a personal anecdote other than to pat myself in the back and maybe reveal to the world that I am the detective game equivalent of Don Quixote? Well, for all my love of detective games and stories, I think they are still a great unsolved problem/white whale of gaming, and that irl experience kind of helped me understand why. Its not really the solving of a mystery per se thats compelling, its more so having to grapple with the question, feeling like youre pulling on threads and confirming or denying your initial suspicions. Is gameifying a detective story just wrong headed? Are we trying to square the circle? As I said I think no detective game has ever got it 100%, with every approach coming closer in some respects and farther in others.

Thanks to A Hand With Many Fingers, I am more optimistic about this question. I genuinely think its come the closest to recreating the emotional reaction I got trying to track down those pictures. Its admirable just how... simple it is? You start off with a few newspaper clippings with a highlighted date, 2 names, 1 picture and 1 location. You then write down for example "1970, John Smith, Paris" (not an actual example in game) and go to the 1970 section of the "Europe" filing cabinet which has cards sorted by surname. You find the smith card which contains 2 codes. SN 231/1 and SN 357/15. You then go to the archives and get two boxes with more newspaper clippings and pictures etc eith their own dates and names and maybe they give a missing "piece" for a previous element, you get more leads, put the relevant info on the corkboard and the unravelling of the conspiracy begins.

And for the hour or so it took me and my friend with whom I was backseat gaming the game with (he had the pen and paper) it was wondefully engaging for something so minimalistic. I joked to my friend how grateful he must be to take a break from his master's thesis to play a fun game which was essentially a research based detective game.

The game also pulls off a few tricks as you delve deeper into the conspiracy, a light quickly turns on and off, a parked car speeds off etc. I thought they were a bit cheap but they definitely worked at creeping my friend out a bit (not a hard thing to accomplish, admittedly).

The thing is, at the end of it all, and I guess I should drop a spoiler warning here,(I do recommend this game and it takes like an hour to complete so you might as well) the game just sort of ends. After an educated guess I looked for the final file in the correct cabinet and got a key to the B annex. Just a single box was left. A loud sound as I picked it up and hurried to the corkboard. A car had crashed through the window! I opened the box and got some important materials which I hung up on the corkboard and which further confirmed our suspicions I had about deleted records and CIA involvement in the whole affair. Whats the next lead... oh the credits are rolling. What?!

We were very confused. You can admittedly go into a sort of "free mode" where you can just get access to all the files but we pretty much had em all. It was a sour taste after such a compelling playthrough.

I read up on the actual events described within the game because it turned out, they are based on actual events (I mean, I knew the iran-contra affair was real but I didnt realize it wasnt historical fiction) which are somehow even more crazy than the game's depiction of them. However the abrupt ending soon made more sense in context : there was a massive cover up, like the game sort of points out there are many missing records and deleted evidence, dead men tell no tales and whether suicide or not, John Nugan was too dead to be interrogated. As much as we dig and speculate, ultimately we will probably never know the full story.

So I do "get" what A Hand With Many Fingers is going for but is making that point really worth making such an abrupt ending to a wonderfully engaging journey? Am I wrong in my assessment that it isnt the solving of a mystery per se thats satisfying? Maybe, I dont know. I think its hard to weigh up authorial intent versus your own subjective experience of the game. On the one hand its unfair to demand that art be made specifically to pander to you, like the infamous football manager ign review, but on the other hand I think people put too much stock on "intentionality" as a get out of jail free card from criticism, and I am even guilty of that myself.

Its worth noting that the decision to make a resolution inherently impossible is entirely self inflicted. Clearly this was a passion project from a dev interested in the Nugan Hand bank story but no one was holding a gun to their head to set their game with a really interesting set of mechanics in the real world and a real conspiracy and at the same time Zodiac is also based on a real life unsolved case and that managed to create a more satisfying conclusion than this.

I think my appropriately ambiguous feelings on the game are whats kept it in my mind all these days after playing it. So at the end of the day, whats my conclusion on all of this? Well, I think the bottom line is

FILE 2 REMOVED 11/08/2023

It is both refreshing and damning that the game had to relinquish most of its control in favour of the player in order for a pokemon game to have good pacing

On replay a few months down the line from release, with an all bug team for added challenge, I am kind of astonished just how much this game works for me in ways that the other entries in the series (which I have been playing since I was 10 years old) kinda dont. Part of it is the novelty certainly, I have replayed Fire Red, Platinum and Emerald far too much to enjoy them without some insane challenge run condition.

I am almost hesitant to admit how much I credit the enjoyment of this game to its transition to an open world format when this very trend has become fairly tiresome in contemporary videogames, ruining the appeal of previously strictly linear and tightly designed games in favour of a miopic "bigger = better" attitude.

But it really is the case here! And on replay I think I have realised why in ways that are quite damning to the franchise. First and foremost : praise be to whomever decided to make trainer battles optional. I hadnt realized just how much of my playthroughs of these games are slowly sapped of energy by the insistence of forcing you to fight boring, slow, uninteresting battles in sequence. There is nothing to them! Admittedly I think most fan games go too far in the opposite direction, making even early game teams be squads of 6 perfect IV mons with all sitrus berries to make everything even more drawn out. They do however at least recognize that there is a problem in need of fixing! And yes, I do know that pokemon is a childrens franchise but this isnt even a matter of difficulty really.

Another thing that the open world rid of random encounters in favour of overworld ones is just how much it enhances the core appeal of inhabiting a sort of monster safari, the interactions between pokemon and humans are admittedly underexplored but they make up for it in a sort of documentary naturalism that was lost in the originals for me. Its hard to explain why. But the inherent abstraction and separation of battle and gameworld in the previous games (I havent played gen 6 or much of 7) made it harder for that to really sink in, especially cause the way the games were built made me view the pokemon in wild areas as mostly purely mechanical i.e exp, items etc. This carries over a bit especially with the autobattle mechanics and associated grinding of pokemon loot drops for TMs (lets not even get in to the implications).

I'll give an example : in gen 5 there is a sewer the game forces you to go into for story progression, in it there are random encounters with zubats, grimers etc. What did I think about this when I played this section? Nothing, I was there for a checklist, grind exp, defeat a rocket grunt, maybe catch a good pokemon if it randomly appeared (this was not likely as stronger and rarer pokemon had low odds of appearing) and thats it, leave and never come back. Hell, I might buy some repels to minimize how many encounters I got.

Compare this to an experience I had in pokemon Violet when I was exploring at night after a team star raid and spotted bright spotlights in the distance, reminiscent of the lucky 38 in New Vegas. I traveled near it, catching pokemon along the way and battling 0 trainers. As I got near to the bright and bustling metropolis I spotted some items near the coastal outskirts of the city, which is seemingly partly built on a platform above the water level. There were a whole bunch of grimer everywhere! "Hmm, wow I guess the sheer amount of energy this city needs creates a bunch of pollution huh?" I thought. Thats the experience that pokemon SHOULD be all about, but imo has never been able to fully deliver.

The soundtrack is excellent and now seemingly the most glaring technical flaws have been ironed out (the game didnt crash, huzzah). On a second playthrough the story is a bit less interesting and still only good by pokemon's abysmal standards but other than the clunky team star storyline the rest of the game is convincing in this aspect. A note on rivals in pokemon : theyre all bad except for Nemona, I will not be accepting questions at this stage. Well, the first rival is okay in what he was meant to do, and N was a... good effort attempt? At what that story was trying to do but honestly I think Hugh is more compelling.

Anyways, see yall when the DLC drops, maybe.

It's a real shame that Traveler's Game outstays its welcome, cause I think it has enough charm and novelty to make you look past its flaws for most of the game. I was attracted to it by the Visual Novel Real Time Strategy genre mix, I love weird hybrids like that. Shockingly, for the first few hours it suceeded at making a dual gameplay model that didnt feel like two inferior versions bolted to each other.

My stance on hybrid games has always been that they do not need to be great or the best at either of its genres, but the interplay between them must create something greater. For the most part traveler's game pulls this off.

The Premise is : you are a disaffected youth in china working for a travel agency. You get told by a coworker who thinks you are lonely, about an online game which other disaffected youths and general outcasts primarily use as a chat room, with the game part being mostly secondary. The game then follows the format of you adding new people as friends to play and talk to who have their own stories to tell and relationships and worries etc.

I think Traveler's Game has pretty good writing. I say I think, because the translation is pretty bad, but also I think it has to be good if it shines through even a shitty translation. Maybe someone who can speak mandarin can play the game and tell me if they agree. There is a nice contrast in the real-feeling characters you meet, it captures the vibe of whiling away the hours playing private online games with your new internet friend, confiding in each other because you dont at that point have anyone else to talk to about your worries, and they don't know anyone you wouldn't want the information to be relayed to.

It feels human and mundane, which I'm starting to realize are words I use to describe a lot of writing which I enjoy lately. Some characters have touching stories, others have interesting points of view and some are just funny or charming or even slightly annoying, like people are prone to be.

There are a lot of nice little touches to sell on the whole "online game within a game" conceit with one guy not starting the game because he didnt know what button he had to press, some people will leave without finishing the game, some people will only turn on their mic after you ask them too etc.

Unfortunately, the game is just way too long for what it is, it took me 11 hours to reach the ending and it feels like 6 or 7 hours would have been the right length for it (its like 8 euro as well, really cheap so I dont get the reason for the runtime). The translation is pretty bad, and I have a lot of room in my heart to forgive such things cause mandarin to english translations are hard as hell and the dev is like a team of 4 by my count, but my forgiving muscles are very sore by the end. There's a couple unfortunate troop types and even worse, the game doesn't even finish! It pulls a whole "to be continued" bullshit for the rest of it at some point but as I said the game is already outstayed its welcome so I very much doubt Ill play through that.

It makes me sad, cause I do think theres a lot to like, and Im being pretty nice to the game to give it a 6/10 but I cannot go any higher given its shortcomings.

Spoilers for 999 and VLR
Introduction
Virtue's Last Reward is a deeply frustrating game not in a mechanical sense but in that it succeeds so well at first, using every clever trick in its narrative bag and keeping you on your toes for an impressive amount of hours and integrating its improved puzzles from its predecessor as well as its central "gimmick" of the meta narrative flowchart; only to ultimately collapse under the weight of a house of cards of its own making. Its frustrating because a game which fails due to overambition is still preferrable to one which fails because it had nothing interesting to say. Its frustrating because for all its faults it expands from 999 in ways that could have worked and would have made the game an all time classic in my book. Its frustrating because it almost clicked together, its a game akin to a man juggling 30 knives for 59 minutes and at the grand finish slipping on a banana peel and stabbing himself repeatedly. Its frustrating ultimately because even after it all its a game I want to love, especially knowing how it's successor turned out even if it was VLR which partly set it up for failure. Its hard to pinpoint exactly why and how VLR turned out this way or why I view it the way I do but I will try to explain as best I can.

Tough Act To Follow
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors was an adventure game/visual novel released for NintendoDS on the 10th of December 2009 in Japan[1]. Despite poor sales in said country it was localized by Aksys games for North America the next year on the 16th of November 2010[1]. It was unusual for Visual Novels at the time to be released in the west and even more unusual for 999 (I will use this shortened form of the title to refer to the game from now on) which sold better in the west than in its native Japan[2][3]. The combination of "escape the room" style puzzles and a dark, claustrophobic mystery story aboard a ship made for an excellent adventure game and its use of the DS's unique hardware for its final narrative "twist" worked wonderfully.

9 People are trapped inside a ship for unknown reasons, they have 9 hours to escape before it sinks. This involves choosing which (1 through 9) numbered doors to go through advancing deeper into the ship solving "escape sequences" which serve the double function of being satisfying to work out and exploring the various characters who accompany you along the way as the escape sequences have dialogue weaved in to make the 2 portions of the game really connect to each other. The idea for 999 came from a desire by Chunsoft to expand the audience of visual novels, in part to a more casual audience, and Uchikoshi proposed adding puzzles to attract the broader adventure game audience[4].

In keeping with the branching narrative structure, you can only choose 1 option from a list each run, giving weight to the choices especially given the length of each run which can last up to 4 or 5 hours give or take. Originally this was very much opaque in the DS version, although more recently its 8th gen ports include VLR's flowchart system for added QOL although along other changes make me view it as the inferior version, the convenience subtracts from the weight and the DS's hardware's added "twist" which is reworked in a way which was admittedly a good attempt but inevitably fails to recreate the magic of the originals'[5].

For all the various Sci-Fi elements present in the story like Morphogenetic Field theory, ICE-9 from Cat's Cradle, Soporil, Time travel etc it mostly wraps up neatly around a single core "twist" at the end and emotionally resonant character moment which satisfyingly resolves a (depends on how many bad endings you got) 10-15 hour story without many loose threads to pull on. By Uchikoshi's own admission, the game was always supposed to be a standalone entry but the positive reviews especially in the west resulted in a sequel being greenlit[6].

This is all to say, any follow-up to 999 was going to face an uphill struggle from word go and I think its worth reiterating how impressive it is that VLR almost manages to surpass 999. There are a few changes which are also attributable directly to 999's succeses and failures. One of the reasons for 999s poor japanese sales was its dark, horror-esque tone. As per Uchikoshi's own account, the target japanese audience did not buy the game primarily for this aspect and as such the execs at Spike Chunsoft told him to make the sequel lighter in tone[3]. In 999 the punishment for breaking the rules is being blown up by a bomb from inside one's own body, whereas in VLR its a more humane lethal injection with an anaesthetic. There is also a much more frequent presence of jokes and levity, not that 999 was completetly self serious but VLR really undermines itself at times with inappropriate "perv moments" and the like. One minute you are horrified to find a bomb or a corpse of a participant and the next the main character Sigma is asking to see Phi in a swimsuit. This should have perhaps been a warning sign of things to come because the later Uchikoshi series "AI: The Somnium Files" is 10 times worse in this aspect, with the very tension and danger of scenes deflated in favour of gags. This is however outside of the scope of this review so I will not mention it again.

A note on the title Virtue's Last Reward
Before proceeding I should quickly explain the title Virtue's Last Reward. In the original japanese the title could be read as either "good people die" or "I want to be a good person" which of course relates to the game's central themes and the prisoner's dilemma. In order to preserve both meanings, Ben Bateman of Aksys games explains the decision to combine 2 english idioms with similar meanings : "Virtue is its own reward" and "Gone to his last reward"(i.e to die)[7]. Personally, I think the fact that this needs to be explained to make sense kind of undermines the attempt, but I understand the unenviable position the translation team found themselves in.

A note on the usage of Visual Novel
I should also very quickly mention the usage of the term Visual Novel in this review. In an interview Uchikoshi explained that in Japan "there is no visual novel genre per say. With me personally when I made 999 and VLR these are not referred to as Visual Novels, they're referred to as actual adventure games. Whereas overseas they're referred to as Visual Novels".

The distinctions between adventure games and visual novel genres are controversial and hard to define, so for this review they will be used interchangeably when talking about the Zero Escape series in general.

Pace Yourself
VLR's strengths sit atop 3 pillars : the first of which is its pacing. I have played through VLR all the way through 3 times now. Even in this most recent playthrough in preparation for the write-up, a playthrough in which I was periodically taking notes whilst playing, VLR kept me hooked for almost its entire 30ish hour runtime. It was in part due to my familiarity with the story that I was able to discern some of the "tricks" and common techniques which are used to build tension as well as provide the appropriate down time to allow the various mysteries to stew just the right amount of time.

The flowchart which will be explored more in depth later on does much of the work to aid in this, as it starts off linearly with the tutorial sequence with Phi, setting up the initial mysteries of why and how we are here, why Phi seems to know us, how she can jump really high etc. The tutorial mirrors 999's initial escape room with a threat of death on a timer: a flooding room in 999 and a falling elevator in VLR. After we are briefly introduced to the other characters and Zero III explains the basic rules of the nonary game.

The dialogue alternates between characterising the cast and establishing the basic premise. A "slow" moment when we come out of the room to meet the rest of the participants is followed by an "exciting" moment of K carrying an unconscious Clover out of the elevator. New mysteries are dropped on us, who is K and why is he wearing a suit of armour, he's an amnesiac, is he lying about it? But before we can stew on it for too long Zero III begins the fairly long exposition scene setting the game up. Fortunately on subsequent runs this sequence can be skipped and before long the announcement of the Chromatic Doors open and ZeroIII leaves us to choose our first major divergence on the Flowchart. Even the slightly dry exposition scene cleverly omits the "penalty" until it can be used for maximum effect.

This is the structure that VLR follows at a micro and macro level. Despite being a branching narrative game there is a lot of overlap in the events, especially in the earlier sections of a branch. We make a decision whether it be in the AB game or escape sections and the consequences play out, a betray vote may lead to a character being angry at us for example. The game never dwells on them for long however.
An example would be in the Tenmyouji route choosing the Yellow Door first. During the first escape route in the infirmary the radical 6 pandemic is mentioned for the first time. Our characters and ourselves cannot quite believe its veracity, did a Pandemic really kill 100,000 people and we never heard about it? Is the nonary game a quarantine effort? Tenmyouji tries not to say anything of course and knowing the ending it makes sense why. The tension dissipates as we meet up with the others and realize how long it will take to open the next set of doors. In between rounds we explore some of the other rooms that other characters explored and even the one we did. These are very effective at creating down time for characters to interact, information to be exchanged and the pace to be slowed down a bit to give us a breather.

Before we can get too comfortable however, the doors to the AB rooms are opened and a corpse is discovered by the main characters. After all the implications that that brings are brought up, the characters are out of time and must vote, which depending on your decision will involve another series of dramatic consequences and interactions with the rest of the cast. After another "slow" round of character scenes Quark, a child tries to commit suicide due to the symptoms of radical 6 before he is sedated. Inmediately after however we have no time and must carry him through the next set of doors to the treatment center.

VLR then follows this structure pretty much the rest of the game. The various time limits given for each sequence of the game are a fairly genius excuse to move things along when you need to without appearing cheap in doing so (999 did a similar-ish thing with the 9 hour time limit, but characters telling you to stop your important conversations feels more blunt in that game due to the lack of information on the remaining time for most of the game). The "Locks" add some complications to the question of pacing as they are quite literally a stop and start affair, but even with those, our innate desire to see them unlocked and whichever events were kept away from us usually trumps the lack of a truly consistent run to follow through.

Quick Footnote : A lot of people dislike the whole "beeping dot" method of not having to animate or do foley work for characters walking around the facility but I think its fine for the most part. It creates the view of seeing a rat traverse a Maze or even that famous turret scene in Aliens. It is overdone though, I will admit.

Puzzles
The second pillar is the puzzles. The puzzles in VLR are just straight up better than in 999. They are not without a few stinkers but they are generally more enjoyable to solve, much more variety. Notably, since VLR was designed with a more global audience in mind, the puzzles feature more numbers, as they are mostly universal[8]. Much like in 999 these "escape the room" style puzzle sequences interweave character interactions, plot and a challenge, meshing story and gameplay together somewhat.

Taking the first 3 sequences as an example, the Crew Quarters introduce the idea of Schrodinger's Cat and we get some interactions with Alice. The Infirmary as mentioned previously shows us the article about the Radical 6 pandemic. The Lounge's puzzles are all about the solar eclipse taking place on the 31st of December 2028. These are all some of the most important stepping stones to the various "twists" that the plot takes before its conclusion and establishing them early on whilst solving riddles works well in my view.

This is merely speculation on my part, but I think some reviews must have complained about the ease of puzzles in 999 and the myriad hints dropped on the player by other characters which led the team to overhaul the puzzle gameplay. First of all, there is now a difficulty selection for each individual puzzle section: on hard, hints will be scarce and on easy other characters will all but tell you what's important and how the puzzle solution works. Its a nice feature to try and satisfy both those who are more in it for the story and those who appreciate meatier puzzles.
There is also the matter of the 2 passwords you can unlock in each puzzle room, one unlocks the door, ending the sequence and the other unlocks a series of "secret files" with more details on the plot, the various real life elements, developer notes etc. In theory this is a further tweak to difficulty based on personal preferrence but in practice a lot of the blue files are either easier to get than the escape password or sometimes kind of obtuse. Particular mention of secret file passwords I thought were annoying include infirmary and the infamous archives dice puzzle, the latter of which illustrates my point nicely.

You see in this puzzle you need to set dice on a specific spot. For the gold file, you must only place them in the correct spot based on their colour; there are 6 die of 3 different colours and you find a bookmark illustrating a sort of t-shaped pattern with the 6 coloured squares. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out. After you roll the dice to each spot you unlock the secret file password. The second solution involves a second bookmark in the same pattern with numbers on it, illustrating which side of the dice must be facing forward for this solution. However, this overlaps directly with the first, meaning what can (and did happen to me the first time) happen is you'll roll all the dice into their correct spot safe for the last, start trying to get the last dice in such a position as it can roll and be facing the right direction when its put into its correct position and if you miscalculate or accidentally put it there by accident (an easy thing to do because its isometric and the controls are fiddly as fuck) the puzzle will declare GOOD JOB YOU SOLVED IT! but because you already got the gold file you get nothing and the puzzle resets leaving you to do that shit again.

This would be fucked enough, if it weren't for the fact that they bring this puzzle back for the last, hardest puzzle room in the game : the Q room. I am not the biggest fan of Q room, mainly because it makes you play minesweeper which I hate. It also has 0 riddle type puzzles. Up until this point the puzzles felt like they struck a nice balance of inventory puzzles, pure logic/execution puzzles, riddles, etc. At the very least its not very long and is close to the climax of the game so it gets a pass.

Flowcharts and the VN Landscape
The third and final pillar is the metanarrative flowchart.
In a previous review of Harmony : The fall of Reverie[9] I mentioned how branching narrative seem to me to fall into 3 main categories : the opaque, the transparent and the metanarrative. Heaven's Vault would be opaque, it branches based on non or very lightly signposted decisions. Heavy Rain with its flowchart would be the transparent, its clear what decisions leads to what. And the metanarrative would be YU-NO and of course VLR; decisions are not only visible but the process of gaming the structure of the branching is an in universe canonical event. This is my entirely personal terminology however, and it does not neatly encapsulate all branching narratives, really it works more as a spectrum than a strictly discrete categorisation.

Flowcharts in VNs were already somewhat common before VLR[10]. VLR's "innovation" expanding upon previous work in Ever17 and Yu-No is making the flowchart help tell its story. As you advance through the various routes will lead you to either "Locks" or Game Overs. These locks are points at which your character needs information from a different route to proceed. In universe the main character Sigma and Phi can obtain information from other timelines based on the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, explained in excruciating detail during the game, in the archives.

This really is VLR's core and ultimately its double edged sword. The locks are an ingenious way for Uchikoshi to maintain some control of the game's pacing, as whilst we can choose to explore the branches in any order, making sure we have information from certain other routes ensures that certain reveals cannot occur before others. The final normal route of the game before the ending for example requires the passwords and locations to 4 different bombs, which each require a separate route of the Dio ending revealing his backstory and the organisation known as free the soul, the director's office (which itself has a lock requiring reading the book found in the laboratory), bomb 2 from lock 7 which also requires the dio ending and lock 5.
Its genuinely emotionally exciting to see and unlock these, a narrative "to be continued" drives you to do other routes and find the information which helps the game move forward. They are as I said a double edged sword because along with what was mentioned in the pacing section, stringing you along with countless mysteries, questions etc creates the unfortunate need to have to bring them all together in the end. VLR is an ungodly behemoth of moving parts, every set up and sci-fi concept are another challenge to try to tie together and it simply becomes impossible to pull off in the end. It also fully abandons the "route" dynamic of 999 and most VNs generally where a single "run" will start and begin before you can do another one.

With so many routes its impossible to not repeat many dialogues and sequences, even those which are tweaked slighlty. You can skip over them but with so many jumps and timelines the individual impact of the various nodes is greatly lessened. It becomes an almost sludge of melted down coins forming an indistinct pool of liquid. This does at least work at a metanarrative level in regards to the series protagonist : Akane. Its not just you, the player who is becoming desensitized to seeing their non-wizard friends be murdered and blown up in myriad ways, but also the Shifters themselves. Sigma does admittedly have Phi to keep him semi grounded but given her characterisation in the game, Akane comes off as a Dr Manhattan type, doomed by her cosmic powers to view the lives of ordinary humans as insignificant. This was, admittedly sort of the case in 999 but that had the emotional core of child Akane, before she set up a ridiculously complicated death game and engineered the murder of 3 people.

Uchikoshi's Writing Style and the Fourth Wall
Kotaro Uchikoshi started his career working for a company called KID, first as a 3D modeller for Pepsiman and later was approached to write scenario for Memories Off, which was a Bishoujo(japanese for "pretty girl", a subsection of VN focused on dating girls) game[11]. He was told by higher ups that he couldnt put sci-fi elements in it, that "if you dont have a cute girl showing up in the game it would not sell". Never 7 was then a dating sim with slight sci-fi elements which received praise : "so then, gradually, I could increase the Sci-Fi content and it just grew from that"[11].
Later on he joined Chunsoft, which was more focused on mystery and adventure games than dating sims. He was approached to join a team (the 999 team specifically) to write a story to be sold to a wider audience than the one Chunsoft usually sold to[4].

Throughout his career, Uchikoshi's writing style has followed certain constants. The most important two to note here would be his heavy use of sci-fi and real life elements (which will be explored more in depth later on in this review) and his "twist" first, back to front writing style. By his own admission :

"In general, I just start from the end and I work my way forward. For example, in 999, one of the biggest reveals was that they were not on a boat. So I would start from there and work my way back. For VLR, the end twist was that we were on the moon, so I would work from that"
I don't want to turn this already long write-up into a piece on Uchikoshi's entire career, in part because I have not yet played the infinity series; but his writing style stays so constant across the Zero Escape and AI games that I think its helpful to explore its impact.

Writing the twist first and working your way backwards certainly has its advantages as its probably almost mandatory if you're planning to have an ambitious structure like VLR and need to make sure all the various elements fit together without (major) plot holes or inconsistencies. You can then think about how to build up to the climax by spreading the various narrative elements necessary to accomplish this throughout the story. For example : in 999 its revealed at the end that Santa and June's bracelets were not in fact 3 and 6 respectively but 0 and 9, which means you then have to make sure than Akane and Santa always go through the same numbered doors so that the digital roots work out.

This method does, however, exacerbate the problem of introducing more mysteries and routes requiring more of an ultimate explanation. Part of it is that VLR has many more "twists" than 999 but part of it is that "they were actually not on a boat at all" is easier to pull off (we're never shown any windows and water does not fill the ship gradually) than "they were on the moon the whole time" for what I hope are obvious reasons, but they will be discussed in the endings section regardless. This method is also why I don't know if my arguments will be compelling regarding the ultimate failure of VLR's conclusion. On an "'objective'" level the story certainly explains itself, its just that on a subjective emotional reaction it ultimately falls flat, its like debating a very argumentative person on something, Uchikoshi can explain it all away but he can't make me think the explanation is ultimately satisfying.

Characters
Brief mention to the change from 2D sprites to 3D models : its fine, I think aesthetically the characters are fine and expressive enough. Kinu Nishimura's visual character designs are generally quite well realized and expressive.

I will echo SunlitSonata's sentiment that "The individual characters are stronger [in VLR] but 999's cast is better as an ensemble"[12]. I think Virtue's last reward has more compelling character moments but ultimately its cast is the victim of the scenario more than anything else. Tenmyouji's relationship to Quark and his backstory reveal is compelling but for most routes most of the time Quark is a non entity; more of a tool to create tension than a character as he disappears and collapses with comical frequency. It was disturbing and tense when he first tried to kill himself due to the effects of Radical 6 but by the 4th time its happened? White noise.

Clover and Alice's relationship is a highlight and Clover herself bears special mention because she's in both games and is infinitely more sympathetic and well written here. Even when she lashes out and/or does something bad its understandeable, as opposed to in 999 where she was seemingly only a bad day away(ok thats definitely an undertatement) from becoming a deranged axe murderer. Wisely, VLR decides to delegate all murder to a single character, although unlike Ace in 999, Dio is way more obviously the villain almost from word go, to the point that I was only surprised he wasn't a Red Herring. Unfortunately the game also demands Alice die horribly several times which again, becomes less impactful every time even if her backstory and personality are compelling.

A lot of character details are nicely foreshadowed in the puzzle sections themselves : e.g Tenmyouji knows about salvage, Dio's knowledge of DNA in the lab cause he's a clone, etc. A strength of the Flowchart is that the player always starts with Phi and then can only partner with either Tenmyouji, Alice or Luna for the first round which are the three core characters in terms of emotional investment and importance. They are also by definition the only 3 characters with runs in which you only partner up with them : obviously you cant choose to only partner with Dio for e.g if you can only partner with him starting from the second round.

There is a constant in both 999 and VLR of making character appearances be deceiving. Lotus' extravagant and fairly horny design masks her reveal to be a genius programmer who, well, just likes dressing like that which is valid in my eyes. K is another example, such a simple decision to have a character behind a mask who turns out to be a soft spoken but cunning nerd. Alice is an attempt at something similar but in this aspect ultimately falls flat because a) her retcon from 999 implies she was somehow dressed as a mummy when trying to infiltrate a secret compound in the middle of the nevada desert and b) her "twist" is basically a rehash of lotus, but as a CIA agent instead of a coder. Similarly Clover has the same concept here but her design makes Alice look conservatively dressed.

All of VLR's characters, even the evil ones come across as flawed and sympathetic and ultimately human; except ironically for Akane, the supposed heart of the franchise. Even when they ally or betray unexpectedly there is an effort to make their actions somewhat justifiable, even if its in part due to the slow doling out of information making their decisions not fully thought out with all of the truth in hand.

SciFi elements and Pseudoscience
Both 999 and VLR make heavy use of Sci-Fi concepts and pseudoscience. VLR also uses Game Theory and specifically The Prisoner's Dilemma as its central conceit. I was originally going to go in depth to how appropriately these are used but I've decided against it because ultimately the accuracy of the depiction and validity of these concepts is somewhat besides the point to whether or not they make for a good story and its way outside my expertise and the scope of this already long review to deal with such contentious topics of research.

I think the most important question about these elements is do they make a good story? For the most part I would say yes. The prisoner's dilemma is an interesting and appropriately ambiguous thought experiment, and as the basis for both a branching narrative based on binary decisions and the interactions with characters who you do not know much about and whose motivations can be vexingly hard to grasp at times it serves its purpose well.

The entire plot revolves around the many worlds interpretation of Quantum mechanics, put simply, the properties of matter at its smallest level exist as a space of possibility which collapse into a single "solution" when observed. As with the explanation of Schrödinger's cat wherein a cat is both alive and dead until one opens the box[14]. This implies that there are many parallel worlds diverging from the movement of particles and any number of events like personal decisions of living beings.

In VLR this concept is used to explain the various timelines in the flowchart all existing simultaneously as well as why at points a character will vote ALLY or BETRAY based on your decision even though in theory they would have no way to know what you voted for.

The Prisoner's dilemma is a game theory thought experiment. The entire field of game theory is an attempt to study human decision making, its rationality and/or lack thereof. A usual wording of this prisoner's dilemma is that two prisoners are told by a cop that they can confess to their crimes and they'll go free, their partner will get 3 years however. If they both confess they both get 2 years and if they both stay silent they'll only get 1 year. The "dilemma" occurs because the collectively best decision is for both to stay silent (or cooperate/ally) yet individual rationality suggests confessing is the optimal play(or defect/betray). If the prisoner's accept this logic, however, they will inevitably end up losing individually as well by getting 2 years[13].

VLR's AB game is a modified version of this problem but with higher stakes, losing points via being betrayed can eventually result in your death and if someone reaches 9 points they can leave the facility through the number 9 door which will never open again. It adds a lot to the tragic nature of the character interactions in the AB game, characters who want to trust others but can't in part due to not knowing them enough, events during the game such as bombs being planted, murders and the overwhelming urge to escape the nonary game's nightmare as soon as possible. This is helped along with the slow dole out of information by ZeroIII like the penalty for having 0 points being death, the person you partner up with to go through the doors (and therefore the person with which you will spend some time getting to know a bit beforehand) being the same person you will be voting against during the AB game, etc.

It does feel cheap at times why certain characters will make each decision to vote in the way they do, basically cause we know they're going to choose both Ally and Betray seemingly arbitrarily. Thankfully even in those instances they usually have a somewhat justifiable reason for it, or at least one they can personally defend. I like how Dio tries to convince us that voting betray against someone who only had 1 point was justified, and how you almost buy the explanation.

Even if the attempt to make the decision to vote Ally or Betray have a ticking clock tension is undermined by having functionally unlimited time to make the call (and the game's explanation for why this is, is dumb) ; the decision itself remains surprisingly nerve wracking despite the repetition and aforementioned sludge problem.

Localisation
I would be remiss not to mention the localisation to 999 and VLR, probably a key factor in the games' popularity in the west. According to Ben Bateman and Nobara Noba Nakayama, the key translators for the project, their translation process involved an extensive e-mail back and forth, clarifying and reclarifying exact meanings and intentions behind certain segments and even the background research informing said segment[15].

There are a couple of details lost in translation like Zero III being a rabbit foreshadowing the moon twist due to japanese folklore asociating the two[16] and arguably the whole-ass meaning of the title unless youre intimately familiar with the combination of english language idioms or you've read the Ben Bateman interview where he tells us about it.

Famously, the entire localisation of 999 had to be put on hold when Nakayama discovered a key twist involved a japanese pun[17]. Basically the number 9 door is actually a Q. In japanese, 9 is pronounced Kyuu, hence the pun. It gets worked out in the end though. Infuriatingly, whilst doing research on this piece I came across a section of an interview Ben Bateman gave which I cannot for the life of me find again. It said that the use of third person for the narration/novel screen was a substitute for the twist in the japanese version hinging on some sort of play/subversion of japanese male and female pronouns. You will just have to trust me on that, I'm afraid.

Endings
Finally and appropriately we should discuss the main failing and ultimate reason why VLR fails to live up to 999 : the ending. Now I am generally not one to say that a bad ending "ruins" a story, but it can definitely make a story built on shaky foundations crumble in on itself, which is definitely the case with Virtue's Last Reward.

You see in 999 everything revolved around and wrapped around its ultimate "twist" which is that Akane built the Nonary Game both to punish the key players in Cradle Pharmaceuticals who organised the original game and save herself in the past/future. Everything else fit fairly neatly around this idea, the facility being a building in the desert and not a ship, the various participants, Ace's murders, and the metanarrative use of information from other routes. Even the slightly bullshit things like the convenience of Seven's amnesia ocurring and then reversing when needed, Zero's seeming knowledge of what Ace and others would do at every point etc being tidied up by the whole "Akane saw what would happen in the future and simply prepared accordingly". The problem, is that this is lightning in a bottle. In 999 this convenience of having seen the future can really only be used once and the denser you make the plot and its various twists the more this conceit has to carry upon its back an ungodly amount of bullshit. In VLR it mostly comes across as bullshit.

How did Akane know Tenmyouji would go to the moon when called? She saw it through the Morphogenetic Field. How did Zero, K and Luna know the passowords to Dio's Bombs? Morphogenetic Field. How did Akane know that everyone wouldn't just ally or that Sigma would make it to the director's office alone or that Alice would be able to decode a 25 digit prime factorisation or any of the countless fucking things that had to go right for her convoluted ass plan to move forward? Morphogenetic Field. It becomes akin to the Force in Star Wars or Hashirama Cells in Naruto, all purpose plot insulation.

Im tempted to dive into some general nitpicking here like why Dio carries a knife with the name of his super duper secret illuminati commando force on it, or how Sigma never touched his eye at any point or asked any of the people calling him old to clarify what they meant by that. But in all honesty Im not too bothered by those, truthfully.
The ending to VLR takes 2 whole hours of straight exposition after the final Q room puzzle, and I know because I timed it. Proportional to its total runtime its not inappropriate but its still way too much to not just become overwhelming. "You're helping a girl in the past from the future" is a lot easier to accept than "you were on the moon the whole time but didnt notice because you were infected with an infectious brain virus that lowers your brain's processing speed and also your consciousness is in the body of your 60 year old self and K was a clone of you which you created to send back in time to 2029 so you could then spend 45 years preparing this whole AB game to send yourself even further back in time to avert nuclear war and a global pandemic". The funny thing is, it almost works on me. Its so...audacious? Its like if Uchikoshi came up to me, said nothing, carefully took out my wallet from my trouser pocket and slowly walked away. I kind of respect it even if it falls on its face.

Despite Akane's insistence that the ends justifies the means, its almost comical how tone deaf it is to meet young Akane at the end with the game expecting us to feel some sort of positive emotion, knowing full well she's a machiavellian monster responsible for countless deaths. Tenmyouji deserves better. At least in 999 her young self was innocent and even her older self only put bombs in people who were evil and who she did not directly kill.
Ultimately VLR contains the gravest sin of any piece of fiction in my eye, in that its not even set in the most interesting period of its story. This is admittedly another problem derived from turning a standalone entry into a series - the more death games you make the more reasons you need to come up with for them to be held, especially if the reason isnt just the usual "for entertainment of the rich/punishment of the civillian population by a dystopian government". At the end of VLR what have you accomplished? You have made sure that a future event MIGHT occur and the world MIGHT be saved; which is just such a non-ending.

At some point I had to mention the elephant in the room of ZTD but in all honesty ZTD being the way it is (though personally I love it, its one of the funniest games Ive ever played, the decisions are so baffling they wrap around to being amusing) is all the more damning to VLR being so overstuffed its loose ends spilled over into the entry which was supposed to properly conclude it all with yet another death game.

I suspect that VLR's original ending might have been a better one, though Uchikoshi's description of it isnt exactly extensive, it seems that due to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake it was changed to be a bit less dramatic: "what happens is that all human kind is destroyed, nobody survives. At this point someone goes back to the past and the original ending was to go back to the past, change a little bit so the future is saved, and then it finishes. However this felt crisp and sudden. So what we did is we added a lot of content to say that you, by going back and working in the past to change the future, thanks to your efforts there is some hope. To give it a more positive nuance"[11].
After a bit more digging I found a different interview explaining the 4th Wall breaking "?" section at the very end of the game which I feel I should post here in full because its fairly enlightening :

"It’s actually metafiction written through the viewpoint of higher realities/dimensions, and has no connection to the chronology of the official storyline. The official story of VLR ended with young Sigma witnessing the explosion of the antimatter reactors from the Crash Keys base on April 13, 2029.

But the tragic 2011 Tohoku earthquake, which claimed 20,000 lives, occurred during voice recording, and we began to wonder “was it appropriate to end the story of VLR like this? Should we add a scenario which brought more hope?” This brought about the addition of “Another Time End.” The Japanese version didn’t include voices in this scene because the script was written after the completion of voice recording. However, during the process of adding this scene, I made two regrettable errors which caused even more confusion. The first was adding voices to the English version “Another Time End.” The second was putting the “Another Time End” right below “Phi End” on the flowchart. I did not incorporate what happened in that ending when working on ZTD. The reason behind that was because there was no assurance that everybody saw this ending. Some players only finished the escape rooms on easy mode. I wanted to be sure that they too would enjoy the story of ZTD.

People will probably wonder if what happened in “Another Time End” was all fake and whether I was deceiving the players. This is far from the truth. You said “My guess was it was the player” and that is correct. I wrote the script for this part with “?” being the player, and put some fragment of the player’s involvement in ZTD. This is the reason I made it appear that the player is capable of using an ability similar to Delta’s mind hack. But please don’t consider this to be the ultimate answer. The reason I don’t want everyone to see this as the only answer is because I’ve come across a number of interesting theories in forums which I do not want to deny. Maybe the character who was making the decisions in the Decision Game was the one who was participating in the game, or perhaps it’s Delta, or even the player. There are many ways of interpreting it, and I hope each fan will decide which fits best for them personally.
I’d also like to discuss Kyle. As mentioned before, “Another Time End” is metafiction, meaning the comment made by old Akane where she is speaking to the player himself is also metafiction. During this scene she said, “He (Kyle) was thrown out when you entered. Right now – in a manner of speaking – he has arrived at December 25th, 2028. His consciousness has gone into a body from that time.” The year we are currently in is 2016 and not 2028. That’s my answer towards Kyle"[18].

Now, if you go through the "?" section it starts to make more sense the impact from the earthquake in regards to Tenmyouji's extensive speech about the survivors of a tragedy having lives worth living and undoing that would be unfair to their efforts in making the most out of a bad situation. This is already like the 3rd time I have seen a behind the scenes japanese game development story mention the Tohoku Earthquake and its impact as a key turning point/inspiration in a project, I can intuit that this is a deeply scarring and generation defining event in the Japanese collective consciousness so I will not pretend to know if the original ending would have been poorly received. I will however say that not robbing Tenmyouji of his past and accepting that their lives were worth living and undoing it would be wrong does pretty seriously undermine investment in saving the world at all. Why do we even care about the lives of millions if we have let die countless people in other timelines. This is sort of an issue with multiverses and many worlds interpretation in fiction.
Similarly, if VLR had ended instead with Sigma jumping directly to 2028 and stopping the nukes/pandemic through something quick or even off screen I think it would have been a much better ending, although our timeline would have been robbed of the masterpiece of Zero Time Dilemma.

To be Continued...
The title of this section is in jest, the review ends here. Hopefully this overlong essay has gone some way in explaining why I find VLR equally compelling and frustrating, and perhaps you have learned a thing or two about the behind the scenes of the game.
If I were less lazy I would have gone more in depth on the visual design especially the environment and why I find Rhizome 9 less compelling than building Q to explore and Im kicking myself that I didnt mention the excellent soundtrack, especially morphogenetic sorrow and bluebird lamentation but this has gone for long enough I feel like. Maybe one day I'll mention these in a review of Zero Time Dilemma or Ever 17 when I finally play it.
I will reiterate that I still like VLR and its a game I desperately want to love for what it does well and what it tries to do with a story only really possible in videogame form or perhaps the world's thickest, 1000 page choose your own adventure which somehow locks you in an escape room periodically.

Bibliography
1. https://www.igdb.com/games/zero-escape-nine-hours-nine-persons-nine-doors
2. https://twitter.com/Uchikoshi_Eng/status/433998278393217024
3. https://zeroescape.fandom.com/wiki/Answers#71_2
4. https://www.vg247.com/inside-the-genesis-of-virtues-last-reward-and-the-challenges-of-visual-novels
5. https://store.steampowered.com/app/477740/Zero_Escape_The_Nonary_Games/
6. https://www.siliconera.com/zero-escape-3-takes-place-on-mars-and-will-make-you-question-philosophies/
7. https://www.siliconera.com/the-thinking-behind-the-title-zero-escape-virtues-last-reward/
8. https://www.siliconera.com/999-and-virtues-last-reward-creator-chats-about-suspenseful-visual-novels/
9. https://www.backloggd.com/u/LordDarias/review/820433/
10. https://vndb.org/g991
11. The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers ISBN 9781500229306
12. https://www.backloggd.com/u/SunlitSonata/review/236571/
13. https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/ap-microeconomics/imperfect-competition/oligopoly-and-game-theory/v/prisoners-dilemma-and-nash-equilibrium
14. https://www.universetoday.com/113900/parallel-universes-and-the-many-worlds-theory/
15. https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/04/22/down-the-rabbit-hole-the-narrative-genius-of-virtues-last-reward
16. https://www.gamesradar.com/zero-escape-past-present-and-future/
17. https://www.gonintendo.com/stories/212144-aksys-discusses-the-challenges-of-localizing-visual-novels
18. https://www.siliconera.com/spoiler-filled-interview-zero-time-dilemmas-director/
Bonus : https://www.gamereactor.eu/too-kyo-too-crazy-an-interview-with-kotaro-uchikoshi/ Don't cry Uchikoshi-san, Cage is a fraud, you're better.

If Vanquish lasted about half its actual runtime it might honestly have gotten an 8 or a 9 from me, unfortunately it does not. The great first half in which you get to grips with the boosting and slow mo abilities and their synergies embody the old adage "easy to learn, hard to master" and rewards good play with, well not having to play a cover shooter basically.

I really don't like cover shooters, I find them to be the definition of tedium as you pop in and out of cover, the challenge being more a test of your patience as you wait for your regenerating health to refill. So far Deus Ex HR is the only one ive ever enjoyed much, even Kane And Lynch 2 whose aesthetics I sort of enjoyed had utterly mind numbing gameplay for the most part.

The genius of Vanquish is that its a cover shooter only if you're bad at the game. You can play Vanquish as gears of war but the various mobility and bullet time abilities mean ideally you will never be behind cover if you can manage them without overheating your suit's regenerating energy bar. These are a joy to get to grips with and whilst I am fairly shit at this game (on normal) it was easy enough to achieve some mastery that on later levels I was barely ever in cover. And I know because the game keeps track of that stat.

Typical for Platinum games, the game scores you on various parameters though unlike Bayonetta or the like you don't get Graded, just a score which is a bit harder to grasp. I however like this system because I always find being graded, usually poorly in these games on a first runthrough to be kind of demoralising. I know its supposed to make me want to try for a higher score on a second playthrough but it just feels like a slap to the face to finish a level with some effort and get a D for your trouble.

The story of Vanquish is dumb, but not dumb enough to be funny. You play as a DARPA engineer whos tagging along with Scottish Poet Robert Burns in order to stop Mecha Putin from blowing up New York with an orbital laser. Now the scottish poet line is a joke in theory but there's an achievement called For Auld Lang Syne so maybe he WAS actually named after the poet? The main character's voice acting is also slightly annoying.

I don't really have all that much insight as to why the game falls off, its mostly just repetition, annoying and boring sections for the most part. Its also when the freshness of the mechanics had worn off and my skills hit a plateau; not that the game was particularly hard on normal difficulty. The boss fights are mostly bad and tedious and the later levels have way too many bullet spongy enemies, even when you maneuver yourself to hit their glowing weakspot I had to unload way too many bullets from max upgraded weapons to down the big fuckers.

I know a lot of the fun in Platinum games is playing it again but trying for higher scores or difficulty modes but nah, I'm good game.

Also SPOILERS I guess but as soon as I met with Robert Burns I literally said to myself "well he's going to be a boss later" and lo and behold who do you fight near the climax. The only semi clever thing about the story is that after you kill the final boss it turns out it was a remote controlled robot and not actually Mecha Putin but you flee the exploding station. You then get an achivevement called "the End of Major Combat Operations". Then "Not Hillary Clinton" kills herself and Mecha Putin implies sequel hook. Now maybe this is me giving the game too much credit but that phrase was used by George W Bush in his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the USS Lincoln after the initial invasion of Iraq : "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed" Of course as we all know, that was not the end of it and indeed the US would keep fighting an insurgency in Iraq for years. This implies of course that the "War has only just begun" despite our fight in this first game being done. IDK it just jumped out of me when I saw that.

Wish I could tell you all about an overlooked gem about the art of tilemaking in Muslim Spain, the role of Iconoclasm in Islam and art, maybe we could have had a chat about calligraphy and other related topics and what a jolly and informative read that would have been.

Unfortunately this game which from the outside seemed a "charmingly scrappy" project by a small indie dev seems to be more of a "made by someone in over their head" deal as the game will just straight up not start from new game. 2 Other people on the steam page have reported this issue months ago but 0 response from the developer. And you know, usually I wouldnt make a review for a game which I didnt even really play but Ill consider this one time as an act of public service before anyone else buys the game based on the premise.

The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa was and is a polarizing game. By virtue of its design decisions and lack of QOL its going to alienate a lot of people, fitting for a game in part about alienation.

If there is one word to describe the game it is ballsy. Only a ballsy game that 25% of its buyers will refund as per the devs own account would let you loose in this 80s Japanese town with basically no guidance. And whilst some parts of this feel intentional and help the mood of the game as you slowly learn how to get ahead in several ways, some just feel petty and/or dumb. Yeo himself could tell me that not telling me how to read books by sitting in any seat and pressing R or having to press B + A to jump to be able to do pull ups(which you have to do to join at least one club) is an intentional part of his design and I wouldnt believe him, and also I would flick his ear for being annoying.

The hunger mechanic is also not explained at all and I was pretty stressed at first losing fights and days trying to scrape enough cash from fights to buy food, but then I got 10k yen from good grades and basically had no money problems from then on, aided by the fact I somehow read a book which apparently doubles the knowledge you get from going to class.

Ringo is a game about roleplaying, not because of its stat elements that very assuredly non RPGs have these days, but because so much of the game revolves around ultimately mechanically inconsequential but nonetheless engrossing stuff. The quality of its writing really shines when you spend an entire sunday reading the Brothers Karamazov so Ringo can give it a good rating on Goodreads and have a 3 or 4 text box discussion about it with a classmate. Its a game where you smoke a limited amount of smokes for 440 yen a pack, which AFAIK has no effect on anything at a mechanical level whatsoever. But its about what Ringo wants to become, maybe you want him to quit smoking. Get straight As and go to the gym every day. Or you can have him play pool and beating up other thugs 24/7.

Ringo is a game that almost alienated me, and honestly I think reading up how to read books at home and do pushups, as inconsequential as they ended up being, increased my enjoyment of the game rather than spoil it. I didnt do many of the "quests" cause in a move that is definitely intentional there is no transcript or anything, if a friend says "Yuko is near the station tomorrow you should go" or something youre just meant to remember where that is in a game without a map and also to remember what day youre on and other such things. I suppose I could replay it but this game is definitely one that loses its luster by the end, maybe intentionally but it didnt seem that way to me and honestly Im tired of speculating on authorial intent, my experience dragged on a bit towards the conclusion even if that ending was...well it gave me something to think about certainly.

EDIT : Always the mark of good art, I have kept thinking about this game after I have finished it, it occupies my mind in a way I hadnt anticipated. Im bumping it up half a star cause I think for what flaws it might have its captured my imagination.